Biblio
This contribution provides the implementation of a holistic operational security assessment process for both steady-state security and dynamic stability. The merging of steady-state and dynamic security assessment as a sequential process is presented. A steady-state and dynamic modeling of a VSC-HVDC was performed including curative and stabilizing measures as remedial actions. The assessment process was validated by a case study on a modified version of the Nordic 32 system. Simulation results showed that measure selection based on purely steady-state contingency analysis can lead to loss of stability in time domain. A subsequent selection of measures on the basis of the dynamic security assessment was able to guarantee the operational security for the stationary N-1 scenario as well as the power system stability.
Concurrency programs often induce buggy results due to the unexpected interaction among threads. The detection of these concurrency bugs costs a lot because they usually appear under a specific execution trace. How to virtually explore different thread schedules to detect concurrency bugs efficiently is an important research topic. Many techniques have been proposed, including lightweight techniques like adaptive randomized scheduling (ARS) and heavyweight techniques like maximal causality reduction (MCR). Compared to heavyweight techniques, ARS is efficient in exploring different schedulings and achieves state-of-the-art performance. However, it will lead to explore large numbers of redundant thread schedulings, which will reduce the efficiency. Moreover, it suffers from the “cold start” issue, when little information is available to guide the distance calculation at the beginning of the exploration. In this work, we propose a Heuristic-Enhanced Adaptive Randomized Scheduling (HARS) algorithm, which improves ARS to detect concurrency bugs guided with novel distance metrics and heuristics obtained from existing research findings. Compared with the adaptive randomized scheduling method, it can more effectively distinguish the traces that may contain concurrency bugs and avoid redundant schedules, thus exploring diverse thread schedules effectively. We conduct an evaluation on 45 concurrency Java programs. The evaluation results show that our algorithm performs more stably in terms of effectiveness and efficiency in detecting concurrency bugs. Notably, HARS detects hard-to-expose bugs more effectively, where the buggy traces are rare or the bug triggering conditions are tricky.
Skyline computation is an increasingly popular query, with broad applicability to many domains. Given the trend to outsource databases, and due to the sensitive nature of the data (e.g., in healthcare), it is essential to evaluate skylines on encrypted datasets. Research efforts acknowledged the importance of secure skyline computation, but existing solutions suffer from several shortcomings: (i) they only provide ad-hoc security; (ii) they are prohibitively expensive; or (iii) they rely on assumptions such as the presence of multiple non-colluding parties in the protocol. Inspired by solutions for secure nearest-neighbors, we conjecture that a secure and efficient way to compute skylines is through result materialization. However, materialization is much more challenging for skylines queries due to large space requirements. We show that pre-computing skyline results while minimizing storage overhead is NP-hard, and we provide heuristics that solve the problem more efficiently, while maintaining storage at reasonable levels. Our algorithms are novel and also applicable to regular skyline computation, but we focus on the encrypted setting where materialization reduces the response time of skyline queries from hours to seconds. Extensive experiments show that we clearly outperform existing work in terms of performance, and our security analysis proves that we obtain a small (and quantifiable) data leakage.
Deep learning has made remarkable achievements in various domains. Active learning, which aims to reduce the budget for training a machine-learning model, is especially useful for the Deep learning tasks with the demand of a large number of labeled samples. Unfortunately, our empirical study finds that many of the active learning heuristics are not effective when applied to Deep learning models in batch settings. To tackle these limitations, we propose a density weighted diversity based query strategy (DWDS), which makes use of the geometry of the samples. Within a limited labeling budget, DWDS enhances model performance by querying labels for the new training samples with the maximum informativeness and representativeness. Furthermore, we propose a beam-search based method to obtain a good approximation to the optimum of such samples. Our experiments show that DWDS outperforms existing algorithms in Deep learning tasks.
In this paper we propose a security and cost aware scheduling heuristic for real-time workflow jobs that process Internet of Things (IoT) data with various security requirements. The environment under study is a four-tier architecture, consisting of IoT, mist, fog and cloud layers. The resources in the mist, fog and cloud tiers are considered to be heterogeneous. The proposed scheduling approach is compared to a baseline strategy, which is security aware, but not cost aware. The performance evaluation of both heuristics is conducted via simulation, under different values of security level probabilities for the initial IoT input data of the entry tasks of the workflow jobs.
Federated learning (FL) allows to train a massive amount of data privately due to its decentralized structure. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is commonly used for FL due to its good empirical performance, but sensitive user information can still be inferred from weight updates shared during FL iterations. We consider Gaussian mechanisms to preserve local differential privacy (LDP) of user data in the FL model with SGD. The trade-offs between user privacy, global utility, and transmission rate are proved by defining appropriate metrics for FL with LDP. Compared to existing results, the query sensitivity used in LDP is defined as a variable, and a tighter privacy accounting method is applied. The proposed utility bound allows heterogeneous parameters over all users. Our bounds characterize how much utility decreases and transmission rate increases if a stronger privacy regime is targeted. Furthermore, given a target privacy level, our results guarantee a significantly larger utility and a smaller transmission rate as compared to existing privacy accounting methods.
With the development of network, network security has become a topic of increasing concern. Recent years, machine learning technology has become an effective means of network intrusion detection. However, machine learning technology requires a large amount of data for training, and training data often contains privacy information, which brings a great risk of privacy leakage. At present, there are few researches on data privacy protection in the field of intrusion detection. Regarding the issue of privacy and security, we combine differential privacy and machine learning algorithms, including One-class Support Vector Machine (OCSVM) and Local Outlier Factor(LOF), to propose an hybrid intrusion detection system (IDS) with privacy protection. We add Laplacian noise to the original network intrusion detection data set to get differential privacy data sets with different privacy budgets, and proposed a hybrid IDS model based on machine learning to verify their utility. Experiments show that while protecting data privacy, the hybrid IDS can achieve detection accuracy comparable to traditional machine learning algorithms.
Pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) is a widely used approach to estimate locations and trajectories. Accessing location-based services with trajectory data can bring convenience to people, but may also raise privacy concerns that need to be addressed. In this paper, a privacy-preserving pedestrian dead reckoning framework is proposed to protect a user’s trajectory privacy based on differential privacy. We introduce two metrics to quantify trajectory privacy and data utility. Our proposed privacy-preserving trajectory extraction algorithm consists of three mechanisms for the initial locations, stride lengths and directions. In addition, we design an adversary model based on particle filtering to evaluate the performance and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework with our collected sensor reading dataset.
With the recognition of cyberspace as an operating domain, concerted effort is now being placed on addressing it in the whole-of-domain manner found in land, sea, undersea, air, and space domains. Among the first steps in this effort is applying the standard supporting concepts of security, defense, and deterrence to the cyber domain. This paper presents an architecture that helps realize forward defense in cyberspace, wherein adversarial actions are repulsed as close to the origin as possible. However, substantial work remains in making the architecture an operational reality including furthering fundamental research cyber science, conducting design trade-off analysis, and developing appropriate public policy frameworks.